Sorry, but this vulgar drag act is no comedy classic: Mrs Brown's Boys pulls in more viewers than Downton. But one critic isn't a fan...

Could Mrs Brown’s Boys on BBC1 be the worst comedy ever transmitted on British television?

Not according to astonishingly large swathes of the viewing public, who like it so much they voted it Best Sitcom in last week’s National Television Awards.

That’s the honour also bestowed 15 short years ago on the superb Only Fools And Horses, which relied on such old-fashioned devices as brilliant plotting, great writing and wonderful acting for its laughs.

Mrs Brown’s Boys, by dispiriting contrast, relies mainly on a gurning drag act and a great deal of swearing. For which its reward is the highest audience appreciation rating of any current BBC comedy, and the commissioning — announced last week — of not one 2013 Christmas special but two.

‘Last Christmas, Agnes Brown was stuck halfway up the Christmas tree,’ said BBC head of comedy Mark Freeland.

‘This year she will be the star at the very top.’

In a way, this is no surprise. Last Christmas, Mrs Brown’s Boys delivered an audience of 11.7million — more than ITV’s festive Downton Abbey.

Anything that can spike the guns of Downton is bound to get the BBC top brass salivating. All the same, the thought of my licence fee contributing to the cost of a Christmas tree with foul-mouthed Agnes Brown at the top is distressing.

Of course, comedy is a subjective business. One person’s hoot is another person’s yawn, and it was ever thus.

For me, Fawlty Towers is a towering creative accomplishment comparable with Botticelli’s Venus or Beethoven’s Ninth, yet I know people who consider it irredeemably contrived and silly.

Even John Cleese once told me that he watches some of it through his fingers, hardly able to bear the clunkier moments of slapstick.

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‘That bit of business when the moose’s head falls on Basil,’ he groaned, still embarrassed. I, however, see only perfection.

The point is that none of us has the right to tell others what they should or shouldn’t find funny. But that doesn’t stop some of us wondering what strain of madness has gripped a nation that can not only laugh at Mrs Brown’s Boys and vote it Best Sitcom, but also give it such a sustained ovation that there is even talk, heaven help us, of a film.

For the enviably uninitiated, Mrs Brown’s Boys, which finishes its latest run tonight, is set in an Ireland that makes that of Father Ted look dignified and sophisticated. It revolves around the domestic travails of the eponymous ‘heroine’ and her family.

It was conceived by Brendan O’Carroll, who also plays the improbably buxom matriarch Mrs Brown, and who is proud to name that Seventies end-of-the-pier duo Cannon & Ball among his main comedic influences.

Not quite Fawlty Towers: Brian Viner says the popular sitcom is crude and smutty

O’Carroll, 57, has been likened, albeit by the show’s director Ben Kellett, to the late, great Leonard Rossiter.

It is certainly true there are signs of rising damp in the scripts — but only in the sense of creeping, festering mould.

It is lowest-common-denominator television at its most crass, reminding me of the worst sitcoms of the Seventies, such as the ghastly Mind Your Language and Love Thy Neighbour, as well as Yus, My Dear, a vehicle for Arthur Mullard (but not, alas, the vehicle most of us wished for him, which was a runaway bus).

Those sitcoms traded on offensive stereotypes and a defiant lack of subtlety. Which is not to say good comedy has to be subtle.

From the blunderbuss innuendo of Are You Being Served? to David Brent’s ingratiating excesses in The Office, there is a proud tradition in British TV of mining for laughs with heavy explosives.

But never so indiscriminately as the expletive-ridden, gynaecological gag-laden Mrs Brown’s Boys.

Out of the dress: Brendan O'Carroll poses with the award for Best Situation Comedy for 'Mrs Brown's Boys' at The Arqiva British Academy Television Awards

Oddly, it appears to be the over-55s who enjoy it most — the very viewers who ought to cherish what remains of the diminishing legacy of writers such as Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the creators of Porridge, to whom the F-word wasn’t available even if they’d wanted it, which they didn’t.

Times change, of course. Effing and blinding is so common on television these days that the ghost of Mary Whitehouse, that self-styled arbiter of TV morals, probably doesn’t even bother to haunt the executive corridors. Her battle was lost long ago.

But maybe it’s time for a new battle, not against swearing for the sake of comedic or dramatic impact, but against swearing for the sake of swearing. Ninety per cent of the expletives in Mrs Brown’s Boys add nothing.

But what of the remaining 10 per cent? In the last episode, Mrs Brown said: ‘I was in labour longer than f****** Harold Wilson.’

The studio audience shrieked almost uncontrollably, as if this was the most hilarious thing they’d ever heard. Yet they can only have been laughing at one word. ‘I was in labour longer than Harold Wilson,’ isn’t funny, is it?

I might be going too far to dredge up Lord Reith. But if anything makes me smile during Mrs Brown’s Boys, it is the thought of what the BBC’s founding father, that granite-jawed, beetle-browed Scottish Presbyterian, would have made of it.

The Corporation’s mission, as he saw it, was to ‘inform, educate and entertain’.

It is troubling to think the subsequent 90-year journey has led us to Mrs Brown’s kitchen, where in the name of BBC entertainment a man with a makeshift bosom cracks jokes about the Virgin birth and simulates an orgasm when the mobile phone ‘she’ has hidden in ‘her’ drawers starts to pulsate.

There are, to be sure, centuries of precedent in the British entertainment industry of men pretending to be women. Shakespeare played with the concept, and most of us adore a good pantomime dame.

Moreover, Les Dawson’s Cissie-and-Ada drag routines with Roy Barraclough were unfailingly funny. Significantly, Dawson — a bona fide comedy genius — never needed to lace those conversations with four-letter words. He would, I suspect, have considered them a betrayal of his craft.

Mrs Brown's Boys' first incarnation was in an Irish radio play twenty years ago. It then became a popular stage production and then made the jump to TV

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt Mrs Brown’s Boys is a genuine phenomenon. Its genesis was as a radio series on RTE in Ireland 20 years ago.

O’Carroll reportedly had no intention of playing Agnes until the actress booked for the part failed to turn up for the inaugural recording.

Nor, even when the radio show became a hit, did he intend to turn Agnes into his very own Edna Everage. But by then he was £2.2million in debt, having borrowed the money in 1998 to make a film called Sparrow’s Trap, which was never released.

Riding high: The BBC has commissioned two Christmas specials and there is also talks of a movie

So to raise funds, he put Mrs Brown on the stage, and there, too, she made instant friends.

From a sell-out run at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre, Mrs Brown’s Boys went on a successful tour before making its next — and most improbable — leap on to prime-time television.

Rarely, if ever before, has a TV comedy generated such opprobrium on the one hand — not least from the critics, virtually unanimous in their distaste — and such devotion on the other.

For producer Stephen McCrum, part of the answer lies in the easy camaraderie of the cast, which also includes O’Carroll’s wife (playing Agnes’s daughter), sister, son, daughter and daughter-in-law.

But maybe the real explanation is that the lowest common denominator is a larger and more influential force in British society than we care to think.

Whatever, there’s not much point asking O’Carroll himself how he has come to have such a hit on his hands.

‘Analyse this and tell me what the secret is,’ he told a newspaper interviewer last week. ‘Cos I don’t have a f****** clue.’

Brian Viner is a former TV critic and the author of Nice To See It, To See It Nice: The Seventies In Front Of The Telly (Simon & Schuster, £6.99).